Sound and the Sublime in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus: The Limits of Representation

This article undertakes an analysis of the deployment of sound in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus that is grounded in a material aesthetics. Oedipus' blindness elevates sound's significance, and the play simultaneously emphasizes the power of voice (sunthēmata, here termed "auditory recognition tokens") and the ineffable (the aphatos thunderbolt of Zeus), phenomena that serve, respectively, to draw the audience into a close sensory sympathy with the dramatic world and to emphasize its ultimate inaccessibility. This exaggerated distance and proximity evokes an ambivalent affective experience, identified here with "the sublime" à la Longinus but also Lyotard, with a corollary in Kristeva's abject.